


Unusual habits

by WaltzQueen



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: 4am, Gen, Necromancy, TAZ Balance, twosun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 07:42:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18616195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaltzQueen/pseuds/WaltzQueen
Summary: Barry is just a human and all humans have quirks.





	Unusual habits

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Barry Bluejeans is Wanted For Death Crimes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17897633) by [writing_and_worrying](https://archiveofourown.org/users/writing_and_worrying/pseuds/writing_and_worrying). 



> yeyeah, ya boi is spooky

Sildar Hallwinter grows up in La Cusha County. It's a ten minute walk from his house, dilapidated and crumbling, to the edge of the woods that lays undistinguished in the tussle of daily life. There's nothing else out there. All forms of entertainment are miles away. Some more industrious person might think this not an obstacle but Sildar is a first world country child, despite the third world living situation, and it never occurs to him to leave the large, empty confines of their property line.  
  
The walkway outside the house is cracked and broken. Ignored by the city, by his parents. The only ones to care are Sildar and his older sister, Gelwyn, who breaks glass bottles and forces him to stand there barefooted on hot summer days. The road is almost as bad as the sidewalk. Pot holes the size of the capitol building take up forty percent of the road. It was in one of the papers Mom brought home once. Forty percent , it said. Bold fourteen point font and everything. Sildar read it while the bleak spring light of the small sun struggled to pass through the fog of the morning.  
  
He reads a lot of things like that. Counting on the gentle mist to separate him and the words from their meanings, rendering them abstractions. Making the world harder to see, both easier and more difficult to comprehend. In one universe, he stays like that; reading in the window of his house and never reaching outside the perimeters of what he knows. In that world Sildar Hallwinter lives and grows up and dies. But in this world, Gelwyn, mad because she is always mad, snatches his book the moment their parents leave for work and locks him outside.  
  
He yells of course, because it's the standard response, but gives up quickly because she will never let him in. Then he turns his attention to the curves of rotten stumps and flagging stepping stones that is his whole world. There is only 200,00 square feet of lawn. The numbers are large enough but it is easily gobbled up in the space of an hour by someone who does not need to scour the earth for its percolating secrets, only review what he already knows.

  
In the space of an hour he is out of land to re-survey. In two he is bored out of his mind. Three hours is an interminable agony on the ever bubbling mind of a child, full of energy but lacking direction. It is doubly so for Sildar. It is torture without the trappings of torture and it doesn't seem right to separate the two things, so he moves to stand in the chipped concrete square of broken glass and overgrown clover. Form and function together, again.

  
His eyes scan across the long abandoned houses and their boarded up windows across the street. The sealed mouths of their doors and the flaking skin of forgotten wooden siding fades into a background. It is as though the world goes flat like the background of the computers he uses at school, all colors and depths flattened into one smooth panel.

  
He is standing on broken glass, eyes staring ahead into nothingness under the rising summer suns when the wind blows. It catches a leaf, a fugitive of autumn hidden in spring grass, and flips it merrily into the air. Sildar's eyes track it unblinkingly as it traipses across the broken concrete and over the crumbled porch of a neighbor that might have never existed, and ultimately, down the road.

  
This is the first time that Sildar Hallwinter looks out at the road and considers it for what it is.  
    It's a road.  
It's always been a road, but now he sees it as such and not just another piece of the flat background of the house. Before it was a line segment, a piece that starts and ends within a certain set of parameters. Now, it is a line, leading on forever to places un-graphed by the notebook paper of his life.

  
So, Sildar Hallwinter walks. Because he is praised in class for his intelligence despite the general financial and intellectual poverty of La Cusha's school system. Because a smart child has to know things to be smart. Because a child has to learn things to know them. Because a child has to finds things to learn about. Because there is nothing else here. Because there is something out there, he walks.

  
It's trees. Trees for days he might be thinking, except he knows that's not true because his parents go over this road and its potholes every morning when they take their cars to work. The road, like everything else, is falling apart at the edges, leaving bits of gravel to mourn their separation from the whole by bitterly biting the soles of his feet as he goes over them. Sildar alternates between walking on the edge of the road, because that is where one walks, and the grasses to the side, because that is sometimes soft and sometimes dangerous. The prickles of magical and mundane plants lay in wait amidst the  harmless grasses and forlorn weeds. They grow up in shoulder high clumps and then they grow low, barely casting their verdant mantle over the packed soil. They are a jagged viridian tide along the equally jagged knifes edge of the asphalt road. Someone, somewhere might call this beautiful. He keeps walking.

  
Ahead the long grasses are flattened, another irregular  dip in the plant life. It's a deer holding them down. The word for male deer is buck. The word for female deer is doe. The word for this is still.

  
It's laying still, innards caught somewhere between baking and putrefying in the dual grasps of the suns. It might be poetic if the leaf that drew his attention was there, caught on the deflated belly or wedged by the wind into the deer's mouth. That's how poetry works. But it's not how life works because the leaf is long gone and it's only Sildar and the deer here and now with the rest of the world at either end of this infinite line, stretching from forever into forever.

  
Somehow it feels more important than anything else he's ever learned. They are all that exists. The house, the yard, the suns' heat eating away at the long faded fog; none of those matter. Everything was Nothing. Because Sildar and the Deer are the only two real things there. The only two real things anywhere. In this moment there is nothing more important. Nothing else could ever be more important.

  
If one were to take a scrying crystal or to cut him open and examine what lay at the center of his soul, if one could flay him like cheap deli pork and find more than the bones, deeper than the marrow, the place where the concept of marrow was dreamed before it attained solidity they would see Sildar Hallwinter and a deer on a scrub shrouded old road in La Cusha county.

  
\-------------------------------------------

  
He takes it home.

  
It is a ten minute walk from the house to the line of the woods and it is no problem for him to expand the borders of the kingdom of the yard a couple hundred thousand square feet over to make a home for the only other real thing in the world. Or at least, in his world.

  
Gelwyn lets him back in ten minutes before Dad arrives home, to not get in trouble.He doesn't say anything about being locked out when Mom and Dad sit down in front of the beat up CRT and eat their microwavable meals. He doesn't say anything when Gelwyn takes his green beans, his favorite, from the black, microwave safe plastic and mashes them into nothing on the wood patterned plastic tabletop. He remains quiet with a silence that no one questions as the lights in the house go out and everyone falls asleep.

  
Part of him is still with the deer, under that red, red sky, the shape of the suns in both their eyes as he grabs a trash bag from the cabinet and unlocks the back door. He doesn't slip into the night, the way a rouge does. He walks hesitantly, dogged by fear of the surrounding shadows.  It is only the knowledge that nothing else matters on this thin stretch of line segment, not the curfew he has nor empty houses that keeps him moving. He knows what matters and he's going to bring it home. To be alone is not natural and this is the first sun catching up with the second, taking it where it belongs, like twins in a storybook.

  
The deer is untouched, except by the stirrings of insects over the puddle of its blood a few feet off. The black plastic bag comes open as nosily as ever and he wraps it around his open hands like a large, fused mitten. He grabs it by the leg and tugs. The first yank does little more than jostle it, but the second pulls the forelimb off with a sucking noise. For a moment he feels as though the world is coming apart under the starlight. After that he resolves to be more careful and the deer makes it home, ten minutes from the house proper, just inside the treeline. It is secret in the way that things that children think in the silence of the night and never speak aloud are secret. Secrecy that feels safe. It feels like a point on the line of forever. It is the beginning of something much greater.

  
\------------------------------

  
Sildar takes a lot of things home, after that. His studies become more focused, less like the wanderings of a wool gathering fourth grader, more like soft-point sniper bullets: unusual, focused beyond measure, and highly illegal to the point of being a warcrime.

  
He starts off small. He chooses deer for his class project. La Cusha's roads are suddenly clean of their accumulating roadkill practically over night. He tunes in more on his biology classes, despite his natural talent lying in physics. Sildar starts looking at graveyards with a peculiar knowledge in his eye. He takes out books on taxidermy and mortuary rites and books on legends from the Underdark from the La Cusha library, but never too close to each other because smart kids know how to slip beneath the radar. And he is a smart kid, isn't he? He's going to grow into quite the intelligent young man, they say.

  
Sildar surprises them by going from smart kid to intelligent, far too quickly for their comfort. He does essays for college students in his junior year at a hundred dollars a pop. It's a high fee, but it's a guaranteed A so the money rolls in. He wins quizbowl after quizbowl, making it into state competitions. He almost goes to national, but it feels unsafe-exposing- and he throws the competition in the final round. Those that had watched him with trepidation over his quick mind breath a sigh of relief at seemingly finding the ceiling of his intelligence. That's fine with him. He doesn't need any more eyes on him.

  
\------------------------------

  
It's Gelwyn that brings in the change. Her omnipresent anger has her fighting with Mom and Dad again over her half-orc boyfriend. He's not allowed in the house and she's not allowed out. Gelwyn doesn't care about that though and he's inside the house when Sildar comes home. He's making an ugly death rattle on the floor, head bashed in as Gelwyn stands above him, barbarian rage falling off of her. Gelwyn's eyes meet Sildars as the cast iron skillet in her hand surrenders its stolen bits of flesh to gravity with a soft noise.

  
There is a long moment of silence, that occurs. They've lived with each other long enough to know their sibling's actions ten steps ahead, They know what's going to happen and exactly how its going to go down. She's going to throw the skillet at him so his prints are on it and then she's going to call the police and hide in the bathroom while she washes off her evidence.

  
But it's not going that way because a smart boy became an intelligent young man with an unusual hobby and the will to use it. Sildar catches the pan, like Gelwyn planned, and throws it at her, unlike she planned. Gelwyn slips on her boyfriend's blood and falls flat on her back, unable to move for a moment. Sildar throws a spell at the freshly dead ex-boyfriend on the floor and takes off, out the door. Sildar feels the Animate Dead end as Gelwyn overpowers and re-kills her Ex.

  
Puberty was kind to him. Sildar's grown tall and broad as a teen but he's not and never has been an endurance runner. Gelwyn catches up with him on that long stretch of road where the bitter stones dig into the soles and souls of barefooted travelers. She's a fighter, berserk and powerful. He is comparatively as weak as the child he once was; he only has one option.  
He defends himself.  
  
The papers lap up the fallen golden boy story as fast as they can. It doesn't matter that it was a clear self defense case. It doesn't matter that it destroys his family or that it leaves his own home feeling alien to him after all these years. All that matters is that Gelwyn Hallwinter is dead and Sildar Hallwinter did it. It's in every newspaper in the province and on the eight o' clock news. Sildar Hallwinter's name is everywhere and it's even worse than he ever could have imagined.  
  
It takes a year for the paperwork to go through. It's infuriating, but it's his only chance of having any peace in this place where nothing ever happens and a juicy story never goes bad. He gratefully smiles at the paperwork, signed and filed in triplicate, declaring a legal name change to 'Barold Xanthus Bluejeans.'

  
\------------------------

  
He brings the deer with him when he goes to college. The skulls rests on a little pillow that has a duck embroidered on the corner. The rest of it goes in a box under the pillow. He explains it away as a makeshift shrine for Melora, god of woodlands and nature, whenever the R.A. swings by. Barry argues that Melora is a hard god to find a temple for, for obvious reasons, and worship in a heavily developed area like a college town would be difficult without a shrine whenever someone with a patron opposing his cover story comes by. They shrug and move on after that, not willing to get into a fight about it while there were tests to study for. No one looks askance at him on the rare opportunity they meet the affable Barry Bluejeans as he comes tripping back onto campus early in the morning, freezing cold to the touch, smiling like a loon. It's college, they totally understand. Or, at least, they think they do.

  
Barry is easy to understand, isn't he? Barry's scared of the dark. Barry's a physics major, with a minor in biology. Barry will tutor you for fifty bucks and you'll remember everything on your test. Barry is allergic to milk. Barry is really cold. Barry has a shrine to Melora. Barry's an easy going guy who brings donuts to class and hates keggers. He'll tell anyone any of those things freely. It's just that he just has unusual habits. It's not like he's hiding, he just doesn't mention them. And who'd be asking anyway, besides a narc? You're not a narc, right? If you're a narc, you  legally have to tell me.

**Author's Note:**

> Since Sildar sounds like Silver, his sister was named Gelwyn due to its similarities to the word cold in german.


End file.
